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Here are some newsworthy stories over the past week or so which I have been meaning to cover but haven't gotten a chance to til' now.

The U.N. admits that they underestimated the cost of going "green." The U.N. originally estimated the cost would be as much as $600 million a year over the next decade, but now the U.N. has recalculated and said it going to cost a whopping $1.9 Trillion per year over the next 40 years. So, the new total adds up to $76 Trillion. Is it me or have you noticed that whenever a progressive calculates how much one of their "grande" programs is going to cost they usually get it wrong and under estimate how much it going to cost?

More on this by Dan Gainor at Fox News:

The new 251-page report with the benign sounding name of the “World Economic and Social Survey 2011” is rife with goodies calling for “a radically new economic strategy” and “global governance.”

Throw in possible national energy use caps and a massive redistribution of wealth and the survey is trying to remake the entire globe. The report has the imprimatur of the U.N., with the preface signed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon – all part of the “goal of full decarbonization of the global energy system by 2050.”

Make no mistake, much of this has nothing to do with climate.

The press release for the report discusses the need “to achieve a decent living standard for people in developing countries, especially the 1.4 billion still living in extreme poverty, and the additional 2 billion people expected worldwide by 2050.” That sounds more like global redistribution of wealth than worrying about the earth’s thermostat.

That’s because it is. The report goes on and says “one half of the required investments would have to be realized in developing countries.” In other words, $38 trillion would go to the developing world.

The survey details where that money would go. “Survey estimates that incremental green investment of about 3 percent of world gross product (WGP) (about $1.9 trillion in 2010) would be required to overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without degrading land and water resources, and avert the climate change catastrophe.”

So eradicating hunger and overcoming poverty are now part of the climate debate.

It’s also interesting to notice the escalating scale the U.N. is using for its costs. This is a 200 percent increase from the previous Stern Report, which called for 1 percent of global WGP. But that wasn’t enough so Stern revised his claim in 2008, warning there were “many ways of acting to make it more costly” and said 2 percent was needed. Apparently so. Now it’s 3 percent.

It wasn’t that long ago – Nov. 11, 2009 to be exact – when lefty writer Naomi Klein, author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” told readers the cost of going green was going to be $600 billion a year.

Eighteen months later, the price of our “one last chance to save the world” has increased $13 trillion – and that’s just over the next decade.

The Klein piece was controversial because she admitted the left was looking for the first world to pay a “climate debt,” what she described as “the idea that rich countries should pay reparations to poor countries for the climate crisis.” The new U.N. report doesn’t use those terms, but they are there in spirit.

The U.N. calls for a push toward the “green economy” even though it freely admits “there is no unique definition of the green economy.” The survey's introduction rationalizes the massive cost by explaining “the green economy concept is based on the conviction that the benefits of investing in environmental sustainability outweigh the cost of not doing so.” So, by that rationale, any cost is sustainable.

And, as in all things from the U.N., government is the solution: “Governments will have to assume a much more central role” in making the change to a green economy. Where there’s government, there must be control and “active industrial and educational policies aimed at inducing the necessary changes in infrastructure and production processes.” CONTINUED

This is a great example of why you never get into bed with a progressive. The No-Child Left Behind law exacerbated the problems with public schools. It upped the ante so that depending on how well students performed on tests determined whether a teacher was doing his or her job. Are standardized tests really a good (legitimate) standard to judge whether a person is knowledgeable in certain subject areas or only an indicator of how well a student is able to take a standardized test? George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy's plan added financial incentives, penalties, and near national standards. According to a multi-year investigation it has come to light that the Atlanta Public School system took part in standardized test cheating from the teachers to all the way up the food chain.

For the past decade, Atlanta’s schools received national praise for their success — success measured by performance on standardized tests. And as the performance increased, the benchmarks for the tests increased. Consequently, cheating had to become more widespread.

It got to the point where teachers were having parties where they’d sit down on a weekend together and wholesale erase and redo students’ test answers. Children unable to read were making near perfect scores on reading comprehension tests. The Superintendent and her school bosses would scream racism when anyone dared question what was going on. They’d behave like global warming scientists and destroy documents requested by the media. They’d fabricate, alter, and destroy evidence and obstruct investigators.

At Venetian Hills, a group of teachers and administrators who dubbed themselves “the chosen ones” convened to change answers in the afternoons or during makeup testing days, investigators found. Principal Clarietta Davis, a testing coordinator told investigators, wore gloves while erasing to avoid leaving fingerprints on answer sheets.

Davis refused to answer the investigators’ questions. She could not be reached Tuesday.

At Gideons Elementary, teachers sneaked tests off campus and held a weekend “changing party” at a teacher’s home in Douglas County to fix answers.

Cheating was “an open secret” at the school, the report said. The testing coordinator handed out answer-key transparencies to place over answer sheets so the job would go faster.

When investigators began questioning educators, now-retired principal Armstead Salters obstructed their efforts by telling teachers not to cooperate, the report said.

“If anyone asks you anything about this just tell them you don’t know,” the report said Salters said. He told teachers to “just stick to the story and it will all go away.”

Salters eventually confessed to knowing cheating was occurring, the report said. He could not be reached Tuesday.

At Kennedy Middle, children who couldn’t read not only passed the state reading test, but scored at the highest level possible. At Perkerson Elementary, a student sat under a desk, then randomly filled in answers and still passed.

At East Lake Elementary, the principal and testing coordinator instructed teachers to arrange students’ seats so that the lower-performing children would receive easier versions of the Fifth Grade Writing Tests. CONTINUED

Bishop Thomas Paprocki, the Bishop of Springfield, will be joining LIFE Runners and running in the Kansas City Marathon in October. Life Runners is a team of pro-life runners dedicated to raising funds for pro-life charities and spreading the Gospel of Life.

“The suffering times during speed workouts and long runs are potent prayers to help save the unborn and families,” explained the co-founder of the group, Pat Castle, in an interview with LifeSiteNews,

The organization grew out of a weekday email prayer devotional founded by running partners Pat Castle and Rich Reich. As chemistry professors at the Air Force Academy, Castle and Reich trained for marathons together in the mountains of Colorado Springs, and prayed together every morning before work.

When Reich moved to Florida in 2007 to work on his PhD, the two continued their weekday morning prayer devotionals over email. They began sharing their emails with family and friends, and eventually started a blog, which they named Living In Faith Exchange (LIFE) Group Devotions.

A year later, they formed the first LIFE Runners team to compete in the 2008 Chicago marathon. Castle and Reich continue to send out regular email devotions through LIFE Group, which Castle calls “the spiritual feeding arm” of the running group.

But personal prayer is only one element of what LIFE Runner Fr. Jonathon St. Andre refers to as “redemptive running.” Team members also seek to evangelize through pro-life slogans on their jerseys.

An Albuquerque woman who violently attacked peaceful pro-life activists outside a late-term abortion mill has been apprehended by Albuquerque Police and charged with one count of battery and one count of aggravated battery. Did anyone hear this reported by the MSM? The way the MSM portrays pro-life activists as the violent ones but then totally ignores reporting when a pro-abortion supporter commits an act of violence irks me to no end.

Here is the video of the incident.

Then we have Obama actually admitting that welfare encourages dependency.

At the Twitter Townhall Obama said:

I think we should acknowledge that some welfare programs in the past were not well designed and in some cases did encourage dependency.… As somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time their motivation started to diminish. And I think even if you’re progressive you’ve got to acknowledge that some of these things have not been well designed.